Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

They were sitting in a nursing home in Oslo, a totally characterless room that fitted well with Viktor’s own characterlessness, the eyes fixed on the blank television screen in the corner. For Viktor Harlem, time had stopped. He still looked as he had done at the age of nineteen, when in his final year at Oslo Cathedral School. He — Viktor the Taoist — had attained his goal: he had become immortal. Jonas had the idea that, in spirit, his friend was actually somewhere else, that this was why his body remained the same — because there was nobody there, inside it. Viktor sat absolutely still, staring into space. There didn’t seem to be any point, but Jonas knew, hoped, that something was going on behind those black pupils. Something must register, surely, and this ‘something’ might, in the long run, generate a glow. ‘Remember what I said about the Middle Ages being a golden age in the history of the West?’ Jonas said. ‘It was a bluff. One of many. It was something I lifted, just a quote from a book of lectures by Friedrich von Schlegel.’

No reaction. No glow in Viktor’s pupils. His face as blank as the television screen in the corner.

Occasionally, when they were in the lounge, Jonas would sit down at the piano and play one of the standards, ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ maybe, striking chords that would have made anyone else raise an eyebrow.

No response. An outsider would never have guessed that this human vegetable in the armchair had once, ten years earlier, been a regular firecracker, fizzing with ideas and flashes of inspiration, one great scintillating ball of energy; that this figure had been the natural leader and spokesman for a remarkable group known as the Three Wise Men: the sort of baffling individual, one in a hundred thousand, who in third year at high school, at the drop of a hat and without turning a hair, would proceed to sum up — to pick a subject at random — the ins and outs of analytical, phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy.

How does one become a conqueror?

Jonas often thought about Lillehammer. He hated that town. As far as he was concerned, it was no surprise that Lillehammer should have been the scene of the first terrorist attack on Norwegian soil — the assassination of an innocent man, carried out by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Ten years earlier they had walked there arm in arm, Jonas, Axel and Viktor, the Three Wise Men, on their way home from an eventful skiing holiday farther up Gudbrandsdalen, on their way home to the wilderness of the Cathedral School and the ominous advent of the university Prelim. Unlike Axel and Jonas, Viktor was very fair and had already begun to lose his hair. Caricatures in the school newspaper invariably depicted him as a light bulb screwed into a black polo neck sweater. And it was true, he always seemed lit up, incessantly sparkling with theories, exuberant notions — on that day too, just before it happened, as they, but mostly Viktor, were walking along, debating possible future demonstrations, the stream of talk punctuated by hoots of laughter as he reminded Jonas and Axel of some of their previous, highly original raids: because, despite what many might say, and despite a rather reckless approach to life, the Three Wise Men were warriors at heart, young men who were ready to revolt at the first sign of injustice and social folly and who devoted almost as much time to making sense of the world as they did to changing it.

One of these latterly so legendary demonstrations was staged in Oslo on an autumn evening in 1969, as a protest against the situation in Biafra. I ought perhaps to say something here about Biafra, Professor, since disasters of this nature have a way of elbowing one another out of the collective memory. But Biafra constituted the real watershed. Biafra was nothing less than the first unthinkable famine to come sweeping into the living rooms of Norway by way of the television screen with the result that for years Biafra was to represent the epitome of world want. And remember: this was before such disasters were turned into light family entertainment, into Live Aid concerts and the like. Being confronted with the Biafran tragedy was like seeing one’s first horror movie, that sense of actually feeling one’s nerves fraying at the edges.

The Biafran war held special meaning for Jonas, since it was this event that opened his eyes to the change that had occurred in his own home. Ever since his father, lured by the advertisements, had bought their first television set in order to watch the speed skating in the winter Olympics of 1964, Jonas’s parents had spoken less and less to one another. The hum of a perpetual conversation, a sound like the low thrum of a power station, so much a part of his childhood, was now replaced by the hum of the television set. And the chairs which had once sat facing one another were now ranged side by side — not only that, they had bought new chairs, of a type specially designed for television viewing.

One evening in particular was to be of crucial significance. Jonas had been doing his homework and was on his way to the toilet when the usual metallic murmur prompted him to peek into the living room and thus he found himself confronted with a scene which he would never forget, one which stuck to his cerebral cortex like an icon: for there in the living room sat his parents, each in their chair, their eyes fixed on a screen filled with ghastly, heartbreaking reality, and yet they were so silent, so apathetic almost, that they might have been watching the Interlude fish in their aquarium. Although it’s only fair to say that when the first reports from Biafra were screened, Jonas’s parents too were, of course, appalled, they may even have wept, but by this time, six months later, their senses had become strangely blunted, they sat back in their chairs, staring listlessly at the television as if they were actually waiting for something else to come on, and this despite the fact that their eyes rested on one of those images which would be replayed again and again, with only minor variations, in the course of every famine disaster: a little girl with flies crawling over her eyes, weak from hunger, and on the ground right next to her: a vulture. Here, Jonas received an epiphanic vision of the true nature of Norway: this sight multiplied thousands upon thousands of times — people sitting in armchairs in front of televisions showing pictures of starving children far away.

It seems likely — and this is just a theory — that this was the evening on which Jonas Wergeland formed his overriding perception of Norway: of Norway as a nation of spectators. Finally, Jonas understood what his parents’ generation had been building on those community workdays in the 1950s: a grandstand in which they had now taken their seats. All of Norway had become what it could indeed appear to be when seen from space — a 1200-mile long granite grandstand packed with armchairs. Window On Our Times was the name of the programme, and people truly did sit there in their chairs as if staring through a window in the wall at the world outside, following all the suffering in the world from the sidelines as it were. Television was, quite simply, an invention eminently suited to a country which lay thus on the periphery, which was used to witnessing events from a safe distance. ‘The screen tricks us into believing that we don’t live a sheltered life,’ as Jonas Wergeland once remarked in a debate. The Norwegian word for television is ‘ fjernsyn ’ — meaning ‘distant vision’. And because the fjernsyn gave such a blessed illusion of beholding some distant vision, one could hold onto the blissful sense that one was merely a spectator and never an active participant.

This experience — I am in a position to reveal here — also lay behind one of Jonas Wergeland’s earliest programmes for television: one in which, so the advance publicity promised, he would take a look at the most quintessentially Norwegian product ever. Everyone was sure this would be something like Bjelland’s fish balls or possibly one of Frionor’s frozen seafood dishes, but in fact it turned out to be a product made by Ekornes, the successful furniture manufacturers from Sunnmøre on the west coast. In this programme Jonas Wergeland stated, not without a trace of irony, that Norway’s greatest contribution to the world in recent times was not the cheese-slice, nor the plastic keycard, but the Stressless chair, first launched onto the market in 1971 — an invention worthy of a land of spectators and indeed one for which the national spectator mentality was an absolute prerequisite. Because the Stressless patent was — and still is, I might say — brilliant in all its simplicity. The innovative feature, no less than a revolution in the relaxation industry, was that you could assume different sitting positions merely by shifting your body. A lazy nudge of the hip was enough, a little wriggle. You no longer needed to stretch your hand down to a lever. The position was adjusted by the weight of the body itself. Jonas filmed a lingering sequence demonstrating the merits of the chair — which was set in front of a television: a comical scene that did not fail to provoke a lot of bitter complaints to the NRK management from the furniture industry. But Jonas was perfectly serious. ‘We ought to design a new Norwegian flag,’ he said. ‘White as innocence and with a stylized Stressless chair in the centre, just as India has the Emperor Ashoka’s wheel on its flag.’ Jonas had no doubt: in a hundred years the Stressless would be on display in museums, hailed as a national symbol on a par with the painting of ‘Bridal Procession in Hardanger’.